STATEMENT

Olivia Welch is the Gallery Programs & Touring Exhibitions Coordinator for Museums & Galleries of NSW, currently working on tours including: Eugenia Lim The Ambassadordeveloped by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Just Not Australian curated by Artspace, and Voidcurated by Emily McDaniel, among numerous other projects.

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Until May of 2018, Olivia was an exhibitions and curatorial assistant, researcher and editor at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Collection in Lisbon, Portugal. This role primarily involved preparing for exhibitions, as well as editing and proofreading English translations. From July to August 2015, Olivia was selected by the Australia Council for the Arts to be a venue attendant for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

From 2009 - 2018, Olivia worked for MAY SPACE (formerly Brenda May Gallery) in varying capacities. In 2019 she curated Our Common Bond for MAY SPACE, an exhibition that looks at the omissions present in the Australian Citizenship booklet of the same name that eliminate diverse histories and experiences from the Australian narrative. In July 2013, Olivia curated Mighty Small, an exhibition that focused on artworks where a small-scale was integral to the work’s intended impact. In April 2014, Olivia developed the curatorial project In Tandem for Brenda May Gallery, which placed her in the position of creative matchmaker and mediator. She paired six Australian artists based on similar sensibilities, aesthetics or thematic tendencies with the brief of creating pieces in collaboration or in conversation with one another.

Olivia graduated from UNSW Art + Design in Sydney, with a First-Class Honours degree in Art History and Theory, specialising in Australian Indigenous contemporary art, post-colonial studies and the politico-legal issue of Indigenous sovereignty. These concerns provided the focus for a comparative and evaluative study of several Australian Aboriginal artists, with a particular focus on the photographic work of Darren Siwes, a contemporary artist of Aboriginal and Dutch descent. From 2020 she is undertaking a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art + Design.